Irate Cash4Gold letter to a lewd prankster

This Internet finding is an irate letter from the thin-skinned litigation enthusiasts at Cash4Gold to a "Mr Haberny" who apparently made a habit of sending gold-painted rocks to the firm, along with colorful missives describing the circumstances through which he came to posses them, which included a Tibetan pilgrimage with a legless hooker from Singapore. Mr Haberny sought many interesting forms of compensation for his "gold," including a birthday party at McDonald's, and an unspecified activity in the company of Ed McMahon.

I knew a guy whose “art”* consisted of sending absurd and irate letters to corporations in order to get back (hopefully) equally irate letters. To his credit it often worked and the replies were hilarious (I imagine over-educated lackeys probably enjoyed getting to fire off an angry letter to an obvious crackpot.) That said, this one is clearly the best official reply I’ve ever read.

(* I considered it art, but I know others would just think of it as pranking.)

While the fact that the employee didn’t put their position under their signature could be argument that it is fake, I’m assuming since you gave no substance to your argument you didn’t base your assessment on that. It is entirely plausible that a cash for gold employee charged with intimidating pranksters to stop wasting company time would occasionally have some fun with it.

This letter, and all of the letters at suckerchump, strike me as fake. The most telling factor is how often the author of the letter quotes the offensive content. Given how offensive the author is supposed to find the content, it stretches plausibility that they continually quote it so. The most plausible reason for the author to quote the offensive content like this is its humor value.

Furthermore, thanks to the Internet, I have seen more than my fair share of actual cease-and-desist and other letters from lawyers. While an actual motion before a judge often does contain lots and lots of lurid details about the purported facts of the case, including quotes such as appear in these letters, a letter from a lawyer hardly ever does, largely because it’s usually boilerplate.

For some reason this letter appears to have been placed inside the plastic menu cover at a Chinese restaurant before someone took a picture of it with their iPhone.

Assuming that it’s from suckerchump.com, odds are that it’s not real. While I would not be so surprised by a few spelling or grammar mistakes from the folks at Cash4Gold, the quality of the writing in the letters from from the White House and MoMA featured on suckerchump is similarly poor, and the same problems crop up in this letter too. I would like to believe that people hired to answer letters for the White House would be screened for basic English language ability, but then again that may be overly optimistic of me.

Alert! Pedantic Missive Ensues:
The two main senses of the word “feral” are: “wild and menacing” or “organism that has reverted at least partially from domestic to untamed ways.” There is no exclusive association of “feral” with animals, and “kids raised by wolves” are routinely referred to as “feral children.” Nothing about the term suggests furries or bestiality, simply a “decline” into wildness. I do not know if the author of the letter intended to use another word here (or, indeed, if the letter is at all real), but “feral” makes sense in the context it is used in and, probably due to the general quirkiness of using that word in an unexpected context, is hilarious. I’m going to start referring to all sorts of things as “feral and preposterous” from now on, until I get bored with it in a couple of days.